--- On Sun, 9/6/09, Harry Gendler <gendl...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> From: Harry Gendler <gendl...@ix.netcom.com>
> Subject: The Omnipresent Leader - They want us to "pledge to be a servant to
> our president"?
> To: "Harry Gendler" <gendl...@ix.netcom.com>
> Date: Sunday, September 6, 2009, 5:33 AM
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> National
> Review
>
> September 05, 2009
>
>
>
> The
> Omnipresent Leader - They want us to “pledge to be a
> servant to our
> president”?
>
> By Mark Steyn
>
> http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NWRiZTdhYTA4MmFkYWJkYjliZDA5OWFiMTU0YmU5YTg=
>
>
> On
> Friday, I had the rare honor of appearing in the pages of
> the New York Times,
> apropos President Obama’s plans to beam himself into
> every schoolhouse in
> the land in the peculiar belief that Generation iPod will
> find this an
> enthralling technical novelty. As Times reporters
> James C. McKinley Jr.
> and Sam Dillon wrote: “Mark Steyn, a Canadian author
> and political
> commentator, speaking on the Rush Limbaugh show on
> Wednesday, accused Mr. Obama
> of trying to create a cult of personality, comparing him to
> Saddam Hussein and
> Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader.”
>
>
>
> Oh, dear! “A Canadian author”: Talk about
> damning with faint
> credentialization. I don’t know what’s crueler,
> the
> “Canadian” or the indefinite article. As to the
> rest of it, well,
> that’s one way of putting it. Here’s what I
> said on Wednesday re
> dear old Saddam and Kim: “Obviously
> we’re not talking about the
> cult of personality on the Saddam Hussein/Kim Jong-Il
> scale.”
>
>
>
> Close enough for Times work.
>
>
>
> But, if the Times wants to play this game, bring it
> on. The Omnipresent
> Leader has traditionally been a characteristic feature of
> Third World
> basket-case dumps: The conflation of the man and the state
> is explicit, and
> ubiquitous. In 2003, motoring around western Iraq a few
> weeks after the
> regime’s fall, when the schoolhouses were hastily
> taking down the huge
> portraits of Saddam that had hung on every classroom wall,
> I visited an
> elementary-school principal with a huge stack of suddenly
> empty picture frames
> piled up on his desk, and nothing to put in them. The
> education system’s
> standard first-grade reader featured a couple of kids
> called Hassan and Amal
> — a kind of Iraqi Dick and Jane — proudly
> holding up their
> portraits of the great man and explaining the benefits of
> an Iraqi education:
>
>
>
> “O come, Hassan,” says Amal. “Let us
> chant for the homeland
> and use our pens to write, ‘Our beloved
> Saddam.’”
>
>
>
> “I come, Amal,” says Hassan. “I come in a
> hurry to chant,
> ‘O, Saddam, our courageous president, we are all
> soldiers defending the
> borders for you, carrying weapons and marching to
> success.’”
>
>
>
> Pathetic, right?
>
>
>
> On Friday, August 28, the principal of Eagle Bay Elementary
> School in
> Farmington, Utah — in the name of
> “education” — showed
> her young charges the “Obama Pledge” video
> released at the time of
> the inauguration, in which Ashton Kutcher and various other
> bigtime
> celebrities, two or three of whom you might even recognize,
> “pledge to be
> a servant to our president and to all mankind because
> together we can, together
> we are, and together we will be the change that we
> seek.”
>
>
>
> Altogether now! Let us chant for mankind and use our pens
> to write, “O
> beloved Obama, our courageous president, we are all
> servants defending the hope
> for you and marching to change.”
>
>
>
> And, unlike Saddam’s Iraq, we don’t have the
> mitigating condition
> of being a one-man psycho state invented by the British
> Colonial Office after
> lunch on a wet afternoon in 1922.
>
>
>
> Any self-respecting schoolkid, enjoined by his principal to
> be a
> “servant” to the head of state, would reply,
> “Get lost,
> creep.” And, if they still taught history in American
> schools, he’d
> add, “Oh, and by the way, that question was settled
> in 1776.”
>
>
>
> To accompany President Obama’s classroom speech this
> week, the White
> House and America’s “educators” drafted
> some accompanying
> study materials. Children would be invited to write letters
> to themselves
> saying what they could do to “help the
> President.”
>
>
>
> My suggestion: “Not tell people what I really think
> about his lousy
> health-care plan.”
>
>
>
> Well, after the unwelcome media attention, that exercise
> was hastily dropped.
>
>
>
> For the rest of us, the president does not yet require a
> written test from
> grown-ups after his speeches, but it’s surely only a
> matter of time. The New
> York Times managed to miss my point: Far from
> “accusing” the
> president of “trying to create a cult of
> personality,” I spent much
> of my airtime on Rush’s show last week
> “accusing” the
> president of doing an amazing job of finishing off his own
> cult of personality
> in record time. Obama’s given 111 speeches,
> interviews, and press
> conferences in which he’s talked about health care,
> and the more he opens
> his mouth the more the American people recoil from his
> “reforms.”
> Now he’s giving a 112th — to a joint session of
> Congress —
> and this one, we’re assured, will finally do the
> trick. That brand new
> Chevy may be rusting and up on bricks by the time he seals
> the deal, but
> America’s Auto Salesman-in-Chief will get you to sign
> in the end.
>
>
>
> The president has made the mistake of believing his own
> publicity — or,
> at any rate, his own mainstream-media coverage, which is
> pretty much the same
> thing. They told him he was the greatest orator since
> Socrates, but, alas, even
> Socrates would have difficulty playing six sets a night
> every Open Mike Night
> at the Soaring Rhetoric Lounge out on Route 127. Even
> Ashton Kutcher’s
> charms would wane by the 112th speech.
>
>
>
> “Mr. Obama,” wrote Peggy Noonan in the Wall
> Street Journal,
> “has grown boring.” Amazing but true.
> He’s a crashing bore,
> and he’s become one in nothing flat. His approval
> ratings have slumped
> — not just among Republicans, not just among
> independents, not just among
> seniors, who are after all first in line for the death
> panels. But
> they’ve fallen among young people — the
> starry-eyed members of the
> Hopeychangey Generation who stared into the mesmerizing
> giant “O”
> of his logo and saw the new Otopia. According to the latest
> Zogby poll,
> Obama’s hold on the young is a wash: 41 percent
> approve, 41 percent
> disapprove. Zogby defines “young” as under 30,
> so maybe the
> kindergartners corralled into his audience this week will
> still be on side, but
> I wouldn’t bet on it.
>
>
>
> The president’s strategy on January 20 was to hurl
> all the vast
> transformative spaghetti at the wall — stimulus, auto
> nationalization,
> cap’n’trade, health care — and make it
> stick through the
> sheer charisma of his personality. Unfortunately, the
> American people
> aren’t finding it quite so charismatic, and
> they’re beginning to
> spot the yawning gulf between the post-partisan
> hopeychangey rhetoric and the
> budget-busting prosperity-throttling future-beggaring
> big-government policies.
>
>
>
> No wonder the poor chap’s running out of material. At
> the time of
> writing, one of his exercises for America’s
> schoolchildren is to suggest
> what you’d like him to do in his next speech.
> Here’s mine: Call in
> sick, sir. You’ll be doing your presidency a favor.
>
>
>
> The president is not our ruler but our representative, a
> citizen-executive
> drawn from the people. It is unbecoming to a self-governing
> republic to require
> schoolchildren to (to cite another test question) select
> the three most
> important words in the president’s speech.
>
>
>
> But, if we have to trudge down this grim road, go on, kid,
> I dare you:
> “That’s all, folks!”
>
>
>
> Oh, wait. You have to rank the three most important words
> in order:
>
>
>
> 1) Try
>
> 2) Something
>
> 3) Else
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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